S2 Ep1021: Josh Barro: Total Idiocy

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Speaker 41 Hello and welcome to the Board Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We've got a Tariff Palooza double header today that I'm really excited about.

Speaker 41 In the second segment, it's Congressman Chris DeLuzio, who I might have sent a little snarky tweet about last week. And so I was thrilled that he's willing to come on and hash it out with me.

Speaker 41 But up first, he writes the very serious newsletter on Substack and co-hosts the legal podcast, Serious Trouble, with Popat, aka Ken White.

Speaker 41 It is Josh Barrow, also fresh off Coachella. So we'll see

Speaker 41 how well our brains are popping for you guys today.

Speaker 8 I'm doing great, Tim. You're at 100?

Speaker 8 i'm totally refreshed really i'm so happy for you what did you do yesterday did you get a massage or something green juice no i took two flights i drove to the inland empire from coachella and then flew through salt lake city to new york okay well nice delta airlines day

Speaker 41 start chugging that coffee then all right i want to get into a little bit on the tariffs and and you had an op-ed in the new york times that you offered a similar critique to one that i had of chris deluzio who's also on the podcast today so i want to get into that but first i just want to talk a little bigger picture about what's going on with the economy

Speaker 41 You had a tweet the other day that I liked, and it said, my number one recession indicator is normies ask me questions about the bond market.

Speaker 41 So for all of us normies, what is happening in the bond market and what does it say about a recession?

Speaker 8 Yeah, well, so I mean, first of all, to talk about what is supposed to happen in the bond market when things go wrong, I mean, normally when there's a crisis around the world, the U.S.

Speaker 8 dollar will strengthen and interest rates on U.S. government bonds will fall.
And both of those are because of flight to quality. Basically, you know, people, they don't know what's happening.

Speaker 8 They're concerned about future economic prospects. They want to be in the safest thing possible.
And normally the safest thing possible is U.S. Treasury bonds and the U.S.
dollar.

Speaker 8 There was also an expectation that the dollar would strengthen if we started imposing tariffs, because that's what happened last time around when the Trump administration imposed tariffs specifically on China.

Speaker 8 And the idea there is, you know, if you impose tariffs, we are not importing as much as we would have otherwise. So we're not sending as many dollars abroad.

Speaker 8 And so basically, other countries, in order to get dollars to buy things from us or to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, they have to get them from somewhere.

Speaker 8 They basically have to bid up the price of the dollars. There was this expectation that we would impose these tariffs and the dollar would strengthen.

Speaker 8 And Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, was going around telling people that this would happen.

Speaker 8 He said in his confirmation hearing: people say Americans will pay the tariffs, but you know, because the dollar will strengthen, Americans will be able to buy more than they could before because the dollar will have more purchasing power and that will offset maybe 40% of the cost of the tariffs, is what he told members of the U.S.

Speaker 8 Senate when he was seeking his confirmation.

Speaker 8 What has actually happened, if you've been paying attention to the bond market, and it's increasingly people are paying attention to the bond market, which is unfortunate, is that first the interest rates on Treasury bonds fell sharply, but then they rose very sharply starting about a week and a half ago, Friday.

Speaker 8 And the reasons that interest rates would go up in a crisis like this are basically that investors don't feel good about the United States. They want to get into safer investments.

Speaker 8 Bonds are safer than stocks, but they're also concerned about growth prospects in the United States. They could even be concerned about the credit worthiness of the U.S.
government.

Speaker 8 You know, you have the president going around breaking all sorts of agreements, trade agreements, laws that are supposed to bind the executive, that sort of thing.

Speaker 8 There are some wacky ideas that have been floated by Steve Myron, who runs the Council on Economic Advisors in the White House, that you could argue about whether or not they would constitute a default on U.S.

Speaker 8 government bonds. So for a number of reasons, it could be a- What are some of those wacky ideas?

Speaker 41 Like, what's an example?

Speaker 8 It was literally that we would impose a quote-unquote fee on foreign holders of U.S. government bonds.

Speaker 8 Basically, that, you know, we'd say, you know, the interest rate this bond is supposed to be paying is 4%, but we're going to withhold 15% of that because, you know, we're not happy with your trade practices.

Speaker 8 We think you hold too many bonds, et cetera.

Speaker 8 And he basically says in this paper that he published before the administration came in, before he received the CEA job, said, well, you know, people could call that a default on treasury bonds, but there's already taxes on interest income on bonds.

Speaker 8 So is it really that different from that? I don't think the market would be as sanguine about that. Anyway, I want to be clear.
The administration hasn't done this yet.

Speaker 8 This is just something that Steve Myron put in a paper.

Speaker 8 But I think that, you know, given the lawlessness of this administration and the wacky things that they have surprised people by doing, I think concerns about whether there's going to be a future effort to monkey with the repayment on our bonds is something reasonable.

Speaker 8 But I think the bigger concern, actually, and probably the other reason why the dollar is falling in addition to interest rates rising, is just that what they're doing is terrible for the U.S.

Speaker 8 economy and terrible for growth. And so, one reason people might want to hold U.S.
dollars is I think they're safe, I want to hold them. But another reason people would hold U.S.

Speaker 8 dollars is I expect to do business in the United States. I need to send money to my subsidiary in the U.S.
so it can build a factory there. That kind of thing.

Speaker 8 And that's what the tariffs are theoretically supposed to do. They're supposed to draw investment into the U.S.
and say, well, gee, if you want to make widgets, you better make them in the U.S.

Speaker 8 so you can sell them in the U.S. without tariffs.

Speaker 8 But what seems to actually be happening is other countries are looking at our policies and saying, not only are tariffs going to be higher, I don't know how much higher because the president won't tell me what the tariff policy is going to be.

Speaker 8 That's not drawing people to put in the factory because, you know, the tariff on widgets might be 25% tomorrow, but in four years, it might be zero again.

Speaker 8 I'm not going to stand up a widget factory that's only going to come online right when Donald Trump is supposed to be about to leave office.

Speaker 8 And so it's basically freezing investment in the United States.

Speaker 8 It's making Europe look attractive as a place to invest relative to the U.S., which, you know, is not something that you could really say for decades. And so that's, I think, a key reason.

Speaker 8 Right, exactly. Well, soon they will because Europe is going to be richer than us.
They're going to have air conditioning.

Speaker 8 They're going to have, you know, the SUVs, all the things that we used to make fun of them for not having.

Speaker 8 But so I think that, you know, what you see in the markets is that there's an expectation that what they've done is terrible for the U.S. economy.

Speaker 8 So obviously that shows up in stock prices going down. Corporate profits are expected to be lower than was expected previously.

Speaker 8 But you also see that in the bond market, because what you're seeing in the bond market and in exchange rates is people are not feeling enthusiastic about investing in in the U.S.

Speaker 8 relative to other countries. The one thing you can do to get away from the uncertainty of Trump's tariff policy is to do something that's completely unrelated to the United States.

Speaker 8 Say, I'm going to build a factory in Germany and export from Germany to France or to the Mideast or wherever.

Speaker 8 And so I always know that the Trump tariff on that activity is going to be zero. That stuff looks a lot more attractive than stuff that involves U.S.
trade right now.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 41 Let's just talk about that global kind of picture just overall, because it ties like a lot of the early policies of the Trump administration together with the immigration regime, what's happening with the attacks on Greenland,

Speaker 41 the lascivious attempts to get into Greenland, obviously the Ukraine war and these tariffs.

Speaker 41 And what we're seeing is like this picture throughout the world where there's going to be less maybe interest in investing in us, less reliability on security partnerships, less desire to travel to America.

Speaker 41 We're already seeing from Europe and Canada is way down. People don't want to be hassled over immigration status, et cetera.

Speaker 41 They don't want to end up in Natchez prison in Louisiana because they forgot to, you know, declare the frog embryos, like the woman that was coming in from Russia. And so

Speaker 41 altogether, I mean, just how worried are you just about kind of how this sort of weakening of America

Speaker 41 is going to be hard to roll back at this point? Because these countries are all making decisions that are rational to what their interests are.

Speaker 41 And their interests are no longer as tied to us as they were three months ago.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I'm worried about it in part because of the long time horizons that these things involve.

Speaker 8 I mean, for example, the weakening of the security partnerships is pushing Europe to spend more on defense, which is something that I have wanted.

Speaker 8 So, I don't think the goal of getting Europe to rearm is actually a bad one.

Speaker 8 The problem is that when you push them into that, at the same time that you're showing unreliability in all these other dimensions, you know, with Ukraine, for example, and these questions of the usefulness of U.S.

Speaker 8 weapons systems in Ukraine, if the U.S. government decides they don't want Ukraine to be using them anymore.

Speaker 8 So, what does that mean if you're Germany or you're France or you're Denmark and you need to buy fighter planes or you need to buy other defense systems?

Speaker 8 Do you really want to buy them from Boeing and Lockheed Martin and other U.S. companies where you're concerned that the U.S.

Speaker 8 government might have some ongoing control over technology or parts or other things that you would need to maintain the usefulness of those defense systems?

Speaker 8 I mean, that should have been a boon to the U.S. economy.
We are a leader in military technology, and U.S.

Speaker 8 defense contractors ought to make a lot of of money if Europe decides it's going to buy a lot more military equipment.

Speaker 8 But instead, what we're seeing is huge gains in European defense stocks, because you have these European countries saying, not only do I need a stronger military and more equipment for that, but I would really like to find a way to buy it from a non-American manufacturer.

Speaker 8 I mean, that's a terrible thing for one industry in our economy. And you can see that repeated in other places.
places where anything that involves having a long-term dependency on U.S.

Speaker 8 policy, whether that's for defense or whether that's just because you're exposed to the tariff regime and your investment in a U.S.

Speaker 8 subsidiary, the entire question of whether it's going to be profitable or not depends on the tariff regime, that just looks very unattractive when U.S. policy is both hostile and uncertain.

Speaker 8 And so I think partly the long-term effect depends on how people are thinking about the after-Trump period, because so many of these things are, if you're going to build a factory, that's a years-long investment before it starts to produce returns.

Speaker 8 If people expect that basically this is a weird period and things are going back to normal, then in the long run, maybe that will be fine for the U.S. economy, although we're in for a rough few years.

Speaker 8 But if on the other hand, it's sending a signal that the U.S.

Speaker 8 is a permanently less reliable partner and people are concerned that the next Republican administration could be as wacky and hostile as this one has been, then that makes it hard, even for an administration that's trying to put the pieces back together, to convince people that they should come invest in the United States.

Speaker 8 They might say, Well, now we have a president who doesn't want to, you know, change tariffs every day, but we don't know what the next president's going to do.

Speaker 8 So, even though you've set a tariff policy that should be favorable to investment in the U.S., we don't feel comfortable doing that. Now, there's some things that could be done about that.

Speaker 8 For example, the very expansive tariff powers that the president has under quite old laws that were not really misused that badly by any presidents up until now with Trump.

Speaker 8 You could repeal a lot of those powers, and that might make it more credible to say, yeah, we're sorry about what Trump did, but the next guy's not going to do that because he's not even allowed to do it, even if he wanted to.

Speaker 8 Maybe that sort of thing will work, but it's going to be a real challenge for the next Democratic administration or even for a subsequent Republican administration that wants to get more integrated into the world system, the damage to our credibility that Trump is doing right now.

Speaker 41 A couple of things on that.

Speaker 41 I'd just like to make it be a consistent, friendly reminder that Don Bacon and Mike Lawler and Brian Fitzpatrick and maybe one other person could make those tariff changes right now if they wanted to.

Speaker 41 Like that is

Speaker 41 possible.

Speaker 41 These people have power. They like to pretend like they don't.
But there is a majority in the Congress for this right now.

Speaker 8 The president could veto it, though. You would need two-thirds in both houses.

Speaker 8 Your broader point that Republicans, if they wanted to stop the president, they could, but you'd need a lot more than four of them.

Speaker 41 Yeah, that is true. You would run into problems in the Senate.
But it's not as if there are not signals that could be sent right now that there is opposition to this besides going on to CNN.

Speaker 41 That is my point.

Speaker 41 To the broader European question, I just don't know how it would be rational for our partners in Canada and Europe to view things in the first way that you said, that this is like a three-year weird thing and that things will go back to normal.

Speaker 41 And if you just look at it from their perspective, I mean, most of Europe and Canada finds it insane that Donald Trump got back into the White House in the first place and couldn't have possibly imagined it.

Speaker 41 They are seeing the damage of close

Speaker 41 much more, in particular with what's happening on the continent. And so, like, I just don't know how they could rationally look at this and say, okay, well, the Americans will get their shit together.

Speaker 41 Like, what evidence is there that the Americans will get their shit together?

Speaker 8 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, I think that this is all going to be quite politically damaging for the Trump administration.

Speaker 8 We're already seeing, you know, I think some people are looking at the polls about the president and sort of like being like, how are they not shifting faster? But they're shifting quite quickly.

Speaker 8 I mean, the president's approval ratings in just the last couple of weeks have posted a material deterioration.

Speaker 8 And that's when with only the financial market effects of the tariffs, we haven't even really started feeling the real economy effects.

Speaker 8 I mean, you're going to have all sorts of products that are just getting vastly more expensive as the tariffs roll into force.

Speaker 8 And that's what's being forecasted in the financial markets, that the real economy is going to face a lot of problems.

Speaker 8 And you're already seeing people reacting strongly to the fact that stocks are falling.

Speaker 8 The rise in interest rates, I don't think most people are paying attention to the bond market yet, but that's going to flow through into mortgage rates.

Speaker 8 It's going to flow through into credit card rates.

Speaker 8 And I don't think we need to assume that it's going to stop at the, you know, sort of the 4.3, 4.4 on the 10-year Treasury bond that we're at right now.

Speaker 8 So I think that if the Trump administration really goes through with a significant increase in the tariff policy and also continues with this absolute uncertainty where it changes from day to day what the tariffs are going to be.

Speaker 8 I think you're going to have fairly quickly, quite damaging effects in the U.S. economy.
The president's numbers are going to get worse and worse.

Speaker 8 I mean, for one thing, that reduces his political fearsomeness that I think we have seen with a lot of the reaction to lawless things that the administration has done.

Speaker 8 But I think that also increases the likelihood that a future administration is not going to repeat what they're doing.

Speaker 41 Yeah, you laid out there something that I just don't think has sunk in with a lot of people yet. I just want to drill down on for a second, which is

Speaker 41 stagnating or declining economy. And Goldman Sachs now has downgraded, but they expected a 3% economic growth this year down to 0.5.

Speaker 41 So you have a stagnating or declining economy paired not with lower interest rates, like with increasing interest rates that are going to affect people's loans.

Speaker 41 And so like even the silver lining, I guess, or whatever, the positive potentially of a weakening of economy where, you know, where inflation is going down and there's, you know, weakening signs is that, you know, the Fed lowers interest rates and then, you know, some people get to refi on their houses and stuff because interest rates have been you know high at least for the recent period recently like none of that is going to happen like this is a recipe for the economy slowing down and interest rates staying high or going higher yeah I mean and I think the other thing that's important to note about the theory of what the Trump administration is doing is it's internally very confused because you know the things like that that paper that I referenced from Steve Myron that had some of these suggestions about what to do about tariffs in a in a in a more orderly manner than what the president has actually done.

Speaker 8 But the argument from him and from some of the economists around the president has been that you should impose tariffs, and at first that will strengthen the dollar, but what you ultimately want is a weaker dollar.

Speaker 8 So the dollar wasn't supposed to weaken yet. but they were eventually supposed to have policies that were going to pursue a weaker dollar.

Speaker 8 And the reason for that was supposed to be that a weaker dollar makes the U.S. a more attractive place to invest and do manufacturing.

Speaker 8 And that's true in the abstract, because if you have a weaker dollar, it is cheaper if you're a foreign company to pay U.S. workers than to pay foreign workers, because U.S.
workers are paid less.

Speaker 8 And that makes the country a more attractive place to do manufacturing. And this has been a stated objective for them.
They say that it's a problem.

Speaker 8 There's a thing that economists call the exorbitant privilege, which is the idea that the U.S. persistently runs trade deficits that are financed by other people around the world.
buying U.S.

Speaker 8 Treasury bonds because they form the basis of the global financial system. Basically, the idea is people in China send us dollars, we send them slips of paper that say U.S.

Speaker 8 government on them, and then we send the dollars back in order to buy actual goods from them. So basically, they're getting slips of paper, we get goods.

Speaker 8 We enjoy a dollar that is stronger than it otherwise would be, which means that we get to buy more things with each of our dollars, and we enjoy lower interest rates than we'd otherwise have because other people are lending us money because that's the way they store their money.

Speaker 8 They store it in U.S.

Speaker 41 government debt.

Speaker 8 That sounds like quite a good thing. And in fact, it is a good thing.

Speaker 8 It is a thing that creates a higher standard of living in the United States than we would enjoy if we were not the bedrock of the global financial system.

Speaker 8 Some of the people around Donald Trump explicitly want to pull that apart. They want a weaker dollar.

Speaker 8 And that would ultimately also imply higher interest rates, even though they don't really talk about the fact that it would cause interest rates to go up.

Speaker 8 And they want that because it would make the U.S. a more attractive place to do manufacturing.
And it's true, but the trade-off there would be a lower standard of living.

Speaker 8 Americans would have lower incomes. They'd be able to buy fewer products, whether those are domestic or foreign.
And other countries have pursued policies like this in the past.

Speaker 8 This is the sort of policy that some middle-income countries have had as they've been coming up.

Speaker 8 I mean, you know, they looked at places like South Korea and Taiwan that had these export-driven growth through the 1980s, et cetera. But I would rather be the U.S.
in 2022 than be Taiwan in 1985.

Speaker 8 Taiwan was a country that had some good things going for it and was getting richer, but was poorer than the United States. And that's part of why it was an attractive place to do manufacturing.

Speaker 8 And so they have this weird set of priorities where they'd rather be a good place to manufacture than a good place to live and consume.

Speaker 8 And as you start seeing that come through for Americans, that you have a suite of Trump administration policies that not only lower our standards of living, but are designed to lower our standards of living so that we can be the sort of people who are putting iPhones together.

Speaker 8 It's crazy. It is not what U.S.
workers and consumers want.

Speaker 8 And as you start seeing the deterioration in standards of living, which will come from the weaker dollar that buys fewer products, that you can see forecasted in the stock market that will arise because businesses, they don't know what to invest in.

Speaker 8 They can't expand, they can't grow, they can't hire, that's going to be really unpopular. And I think that it hasn't really settled in for people that this is what the administration is trying to do.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 4 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 7 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 9 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 15 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 22 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 29 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 34 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 36 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

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Speaker 41 What's your sense of the like the risk level at this point of

Speaker 41 that advantage that we've held? The U.S. reserve currency, these countries are storing money in U.S.
government bonds.

Speaker 41 Like, how at risk is that right now of going away for good over the next four years?

Speaker 8 I mean, a lot of people are quite invested in that system around the world. The cost of changing it is substantial.

Speaker 8 The Eurozone is not without problems of its own, although I'd probably rather be them than us right now. And so, you know, I don't want people to think that it's like it's gone.

Speaker 8 And the moves that we've seen in interest rates and in the exchange rate, it's material, but it's not like shockingly large.

Speaker 8 Like we've gone from, what is it, 153 yen to a dollar to 145 or something like that. This is not outside the range of where these currencies have traded in the past.

Speaker 8 So I don't want people to think that we are in, you know, that we're already headed into a global economic depression and that things can't be turned around.

Speaker 8 I think what we're seeing from the markets is a significant warning sign. And I think it entails some risk that that system could unravel, but I don't think it has unraveled yet.

Speaker 8 I don't think it's set out on an unstoppable path toward unraveling.

Speaker 41 But that's not a zero.

Speaker 41 It's not a higher than a zero percentage. It's higher than zero.
Which is what it was four months ago, or not six months ago.

Speaker 8 And this is also, I mean, Matt Aglesias makes this point eloquently a lot, which is that, you know, there's a lot of things that probably won't happen under Donald Trump, but that are, you know, have a high enough enough probability of happening that it's very concerning.

Speaker 8 Yes. If a negative event might have happened 10% of the time, that's something you should still concern yourself with, even though you are not forecasting that it is going to happen.

Speaker 41 This is how I feel about the Trump third term stuff. I'm like, I don't know.
It seems quite unlikely to me, but is it 15% that he tries? Is it 20? Is it 7? 7 is way too high.

Speaker 8 He's very old.

Speaker 41 He is very old. I don't know.
He's very old. He's been doing this forever.
Isn't he kind of like, you know how they always show in the local news? It's like an 108-year-old lady and she's in Alabama.

Speaker 41 She's been smoking and drinking whiskey her whole life and she's still going. And they're like, what's your secret? And it's like, every morning, I, you know, I have a maker's mark.

Speaker 41 Like, I kind of feel like Trump might be like that, though.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 The reason that lady gets on the news is that she's highly unusual. And the other thing, I mean,

Speaker 41 so is Trump. It's highly unusual.

Speaker 8 Just as a side note, one thing I love about these like super old people stories is that a huge fraction of people who purport to be 110 or something like that, in fact, just their birth record is wrong.

Speaker 8 And they are in fact substantially younger than they say they are, sometimes even substantially younger than they believe they are.

Speaker 8 There was that woman in France who seemed to be basically defrauding the government out of her mother's pension and had assumed her mother's identity.

Speaker 41 This is such a Josh Barra take. You're like, I want to take the joy from People's Today Show soft news story, okay? I'm bringing facts to this.

Speaker 8 Like, you know, some jurisdiction started issuing accurate birth certificates in 1923 or something like that.

Speaker 8 And then you see that there were way more centenarians purportedly born in 1922 than 1924, that kind of thing. Sorry for being

Speaker 41 no, that is not sorry. That is just the quintessential Josh Barrow aside.
So I was happy that we were all here to enjoy it together. Yeah.

Speaker 37 Just a couple other quick tarot things.

Speaker 41 I forget if I saw you or Iglesias. You know, you're kind of interchangeable in some ways sharing the story about what's happening with the tomatoes.

Speaker 41 I do just want to focus on this because, you know, some of the eggs discourse is kind kind of silly, but this tomatoes, they announced a 20% tariff on tomatoes coming from Mexico, that the Commerce Department did.

Speaker 41 And their like stated argument in defense of this was that the tomatoes coming in from Mexico were too cheap. And so they have a literal policy.
of increasing tomato prices for people.

Speaker 41 Talk to us about that.

Speaker 8 Well, so I'd say two things about this. One is that, again, it goes to that they're more focused on that the U.S.
should be a good place to grow tomatoes than that the U.S.

Speaker 8 should be a good place to eat tomatoes. And the vast majority of us do not grow tomatoes.
We only eat them. And yeah, explicitly, the goal of the policy is to make tomatoes more expensive.

Speaker 8 What they say is unfair is that the Mexican farmers are selling us tomatoes at too low a price. The tomato price needs to be higher because that will be fair to U.S.
farmers.

Speaker 8 And so again, this is a policy that is not written with the benefit of the U.S. consumer in mind.

Speaker 8 The other thing I'd say about it is that this is kind of the least weird part of the Trump trade policy.

Speaker 8 I mean, lots of administrations have done trade policy like this around things like aluminum and steel, which the Trump administration is doing, but so did George Bush.

Speaker 8 Democratic administrations also have taken this position that it's a shrimpers.

Speaker 41 We hear about this on Louisiana. There have been a lot of tariffs protecting the shrimpers on and off in the past.

Speaker 8 And so the idea that you would impose a tariff to protect a specific U.S. industry from foreign competition is a bad idea.

Speaker 8 But that's actually one of the trade ideas that Trump does that isn't really unique to him.

Speaker 8 What's unusual with him is these vast tariffs across all kinds of products, across all kinds of countries, that are not aimed at the protection of specific industries.

Speaker 8 Now, I don't think we should be using tariffs to protect specific industries because I care about the U.S. consumer.
And this has been a long-running dispute about the tomatoes.

Speaker 8 This is one of the things that Trump is doing on trade that is actually kind of within the set of bad things that other presidents might do.

Speaker 8 That's comforting. It's another reason to take away the president's tariff authorities.
I don't want tariffs on tomatoes either.

Speaker 8 But this is, you know, in a way, this is like one of the least norm-breaking parts of the tariff stuff that he's doing.

Speaker 41 So that was coming out of the Commerce Department. I'm wondering how you grade Besant and Luttnick.
Are they our worst cabinet secretaries in our life? I think it's pretty surprising.

Speaker 41 I guess coming in, I was expecting the worst to be, you know, the TV show host running the military, you know, or like there are a lot of candidates from the last Trump administration, but these two are pretty competitive.

Speaker 41 Where do you rank them?

Speaker 8 I don't know what to make of it. I've sort of been wondering, you know, what would life be like right now if we had Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and Jared back

Speaker 8 in the Oval Office giving the president good advice.

Speaker 8 And I think people should realize, by the way, that you know, as much as you may not like Jared, it's actually worse with him not there than it was with him there.

Speaker 41 Yeah, though, I made the argument that we wanted it to be worse the first time because the risk of having to do this again would have been lower. But you know, we can split hairs on that.

Speaker 8 I think the worse, the better is almost never true because you assure yourself worse and then you have a theory of how that might produce better.

Speaker 41 Yeah. Well, that's fair, but now we have the benefit of hindsight and we know that the mitigating the worst did not actually protect us from the worst because we're living it now.

Speaker 41 So, you know, either way.

Speaker 8 I mean, it's kind of amazing watching what's happened over the last three months that the first Trump administration went as well as it did, especially on the economy, where you saw like a broadly, basically competent economic policy from the first Trump administration, which is why he was, you know, popular enough to almost win again and then to win four years later.

Speaker 8 I think that, you know, if he didn't have that economic record, I think you're right that he would have been less competitive.

Speaker 8 I don't know whether that's because the personnel was better or because he was more inclined to listen to them.

Speaker 8 I mean, when Steve Mnuchin was picked in 2017, or maybe he was announced in 2016, he looked underqualified for the Treasury Secretary job.

Speaker 8 It was kind of like this, you know, he had been politically associated with Trump and was this kind of, you know, middling finance guy that had been picked for this job.

Speaker 8 He turned out to be very good at it, partly because I think he was less egotistical than some of these other officials. He knew that he was maybe a little bit underqualified.

Speaker 8 And so he he really listened to expert advice. And, you know, and but anyway, he did a good job.
And so did Gary Cohn. But Trump also clearly had a willingness to listen to them.

Speaker 8 And, you know, he had big ideas about tariffs that he repeatedly got talked out of during the first term.

Speaker 8 And so I think in significant part, there's been a big change in Trump, where he just is less interested in consensus advice and listening to other people's guidance rather than his own wacky ideas that he's had about the economy for 50 years.

Speaker 8 So, I mean, I think Scott Besant is a smart guy, and the stuff that he said about tariffs before the administration started made clear that Scott Besant doesn't think the policies they're actually implementing now are good policies.

Speaker 8 I just think he doesn't have any juice. I don't think that, you know.

Speaker 9 I guess I would say he's not very savvy.

Speaker 41 I'm not going to render a verdict on whether he's smart, but I've watched enough of his interviews now to know that he's not very savvy.

Speaker 41 And he comes off as extremely out of touch and affected, and his arguments are not particularly compelling. I mean, say what you want about J.D.
Vance or Marco.

Speaker 41 Like, they're both pretty savvy at like navigating the

Speaker 41 QA around Trump's ridiculousness. Besant seems totally incapable of handling that.

Speaker 8 But there's no good way to market this tariff policy. I think that's, you know, an even more hopeless assignment than certain other aspects of the administration's policy.

Speaker 8 You know, Marco and the immigration stuff, a lot of it is awful, but it's at least responding to a real political impulse in the United States where people were really unhappy with the level of irregular immigration under Joe Biden and like get tough on that is the thing that there's a big market for.

Speaker 8 The president's approval ratings are actually still a little bit above water on immigration.

Speaker 8 As an assignment in terms of go out and defend this awful thing, I think it's a lot easier with that than it is with this really idiotic tariff policy that is just going to make everybody poor.

Speaker 8 And that's especially because Trump is so insistent on being so unpredictable about the tariffs because he clearly he loves that.

Speaker 8 He loves that, you know, everyone is hanging on his every word and people have to come into the Oval Office and beg him to make changes.

Speaker 8 And Tim Cook is there lobbying him all the time about, you know, please give me an exemption, et cetera, et cetera. Trump loves that.

Speaker 8 But that just makes the tariff policy not only so much worse for the economy, it also makes it completely incapable of achieving the stated goals the Trump administration has here.

Speaker 8 This is not a policy that is designed such that it will actually foster the construction of factories in the United States, for example.

Speaker 8 So there's a version of the tariff policy that would have been large tariffs that are clearly telegraphed, that are announced, and they stick to them.

Speaker 8 And it still would have been a bad policy, but at least you would have been able to explain what the hell you were doing. This, there's no available explanation for.

Speaker 8 I don't think Steve Mnuchin would be doing a good job messaging it if he were here.

Speaker 8 I think the thing that you see, the demonstration that Steve Mnuchin is smart is that he didn't come back to serve in this administration. I think Besson has an impossible job.

Speaker 41 So you're not as embittered as I am that the first gay Republican cabinet secretary is is so hapless. That's fine.
I'm just taking a little more personal.

Speaker 8 But, you know, I mean, we are not a Borg. I'm not responsible for what Scott Besant does because Scott Besant is attracted to men.
I mean, that's his problem.

Speaker 41 I'm not responsible for it either. It's just it carries a little bit more, I don't know, there is a little bit more resentment.
I don't know. So there's something.

Speaker 8 Steve Myron is gay too. It's like the, it is this, yeah, it's this little gay mafia like implementing the worst economic policy of the last 90 years in the United States.

Speaker 8 It's It's not great for respectability politics. I get that.
But I just think it's important for us to assert that we are all individuals.

Speaker 8 And the fact that some gay individuals are doing something stupid is not our fault or our responsibility.

Speaker 41 I am an individual and I share that. I just, as a gay individual, I'm also petty.

Speaker 41 So there's that.

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Speaker 41 On the Dems, really quick on this side to Luzio on.

Speaker 41 He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how the Dems, including him, were making some mistakes by trying to split the baby on this tariffs thing and talk about strategic tariffs.

Speaker 41 I just want to kind of let you cook for two minutes on what you think the Dems should be doing on this issue.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, I think people need to remember that there's a difference between policies that poll well if you ask people about them and policies that will poll well if you actually implement them.

Speaker 8 I think that there's, you know, there's been a lot of broad, you know, sort of free-floating discontent about NAFTA and the global economic system.

Speaker 8 And people talk about tariffs as something that's, you know, supposed to protect the U.S. And that's a message that some voters find appealing.

Speaker 8 But now we're seeing tariffs actually get implemented and they're already unpopular. They're especially unpopular with Democrats.

Speaker 8 And they're going to be even more unpopular in six months as the damage gets visited on the economy.

Speaker 8 And I think that's because tariffs are a bad idea, once you implement them and people see what they do, it's going to be a toxic policy idea.

Speaker 8 And so I think for certain reasons of populist messaging and for misunderstandings of economics, some Democrats have gotten relatively hostile to free trade over the last 15 years and have gotten some political mileage talking about trade restrictions being good.

Speaker 8 I think that's just out of date. as a political matter.
It was always wrong as an economic matter. And now what you're seeing is the vast majority of Democrats say tariffs are bad.

Speaker 8 I don't like tariffs. And so there's no reason for Democrats to be hedging on this issue.

Speaker 8 What they should say is Donald Trump is making you poorer and imposing a tax on you and cutting us off from the global economic system that has been very important for upholding the U.S. economy.

Speaker 8 And we need to put that back together. So not only should we oppose Trump's tariffs, we should oppose tariffs generally.

Speaker 8 We should seek to rebuild our global economic alliances by entering into binding free trade agreements. I mean, you know, the...

Speaker 8 We were supposed to have a trade policy that was built around isolating China because China is hostile for non-economic reasons.

Speaker 8 And so if you were going to do that, you needed to have friendly trade relations with Japan and Vietnam and all these countries that Trump is giving the middle finger to.

Speaker 8 The way you could put that back together is, you know, you could have a free trade agreement that's built around isolating China. That's something that the Obama administration was negotiating.

Speaker 8 That was the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And then Bernie Sanders had his, you know, anti-global elites messaging that Hillary Clinton felt the need to copy.

Speaker 8 And so you had Democrats turn against that stuff, and Trump obviously didn't want to do it.

Speaker 8 I think that's something that a next Democratic president should say, we're going to build that stuff back together again.

Speaker 8 We're going to do a trans-Pacific partnership because we're going to rebuild our alliances in Asia and then similarly in Europe.

Speaker 8 I think the time is ripe for Democrats to be the pro-global party, the party that wants the U.S. to remain at its position at the head of the global economic system.

Speaker 8 And I think that as Trump makes us poorer, I think that's going to become a popular thing. So I don't think there's a good reason for Democrats to hedge.

Speaker 8 I think it's worth noting, not all Democrats are hedging on this.

Speaker 8 I've been critical of what Congressman DeLusio has to say about this, but part of why DeLusio is notable is that he's been one of the figures in the party where not everybody's saying this.

Speaker 8 He's been saying this wrong thing. Jared Polis gets an A, the governor of Colorado.

Speaker 8 I mean, he not only talks about Trump's tariffs are bad, but he talks about, you know, voluntary trade makes both parties engaging in the trade richer. That's why people do trade.

Speaker 8 It's because you'd rather have the thing the foreign country has than have what you have.

Speaker 8 And so his messaging on this has been, you know, really crisp and clear and tying Trump's policies to a broader ideological idea of why we want to be open.

Speaker 8 And some of the other presidential hope polls have been pretty good on this. J.B.
Pritzker, you know, has been very clear on the messaging. Trump is imposing a tax on you.

Speaker 8 Both him and Josh Shapiro have been going to local businesses and saying, you know, look at these vats in this brewery. Those are made of steel.

Speaker 8 Trump is imposing steel tariffs that will make that more expensive, make it harder to make beer here. The aluminum for the cans is going to be more expensive.

Speaker 8 They're really tying this to everyday business and consumer concerns. But I'd encourage them to think a little deeply about what that implies for other trade policies.

Speaker 8 Because it was interesting, Josh Shapiro was on with Stephanie Ruhl on MSNBC, and she used to be a business journalist over at Bloomberg.

Speaker 8 And she was asking Shapiro about, you know, a lot of people are upset about what happened in the 90s in Pennsylvania with NAFTA.

Speaker 8 And Shapiro talks about, oh, well, you know, those trade deals, you know, Pennsylvania workers got screwed by bad trade deals, but we're going to make good trade deals now, more or less.

Speaker 8 There's an inconsistency there because he's talking about today, we need cheaper steel and cheaper aluminum so that businesses in Pennsylvania that use steel and aluminum can get it more cheaply.

Speaker 8 But the implication about the 90s, I mean, when people talk about NAFTA screwed people, what they mean is that U.S.

Speaker 8 steel workers ended up having to compete with steel workers from abroad selling cheaper steel. So in a way, he's having it both ways there.

Speaker 8 He's talking about, you know, now we shouldn't have these metal tariffs, but the implication is the metal tariffs were good 30 years ago.

Speaker 8 I think you kind of need to admit that, you know, a lot more people in the U.S. work in industries that consume steel and aluminum than in industries that make primary steel and aluminum.

Speaker 8 And so you want cheaper materials. There's a few steel workers that'll be bad for, but there's a lot more auto workers that's good for.

Speaker 8 And I think we're about to get an object lesson in that that makes clear that if you have tariffs and they make auto parts more expensive, that's not going to protect the U.S. auto industry.

Speaker 8 It's actually going to make the U.S. auto industry less competitive.
It's going to be bad for workers.

Speaker 8 But I think you end up wanting a really clear, crisp, pro-trade message there because you end up with, you know, not only are we friendlier with the world and not picking fights for no reason, we're also richer if we open ourselves up to trade.

Speaker 41 All right. Well, you're flattering my priors on this.
We'll see what Congressman Veluzio has to say about it in the next segment.

Speaker 41 The immigration stuff, I just want to talk about with you briefly because you have a legal podcast.

Speaker 41 I want to get your legal take on what was happening yesterday in the Oval Office, where the El Salvador president, to me, looks like he has a lot of filler in his face.

Speaker 41 Not an expert on that, but that was just one observation I had from the self-styled world school as dictator. What did you make of the

Speaker 41 whole scene in there?

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, I thought Ben Dreyfus had this right, that Bukhalay is dressed like the manager of a Zara in the valley, who goes to the food court and asks 19-year-old girls whether they've ever considered modeling.

Speaker 41 That's creepy. That's a creepy image.
Adult braces, maybe.

Speaker 8 Yeah, but he looked creepy.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, it just goes to show the craziness of the Trump administration foreign policy, where we're giving the middle finger to Europe and Japan and other rich country trading partners of ours and also middle-income countries like Mexico that we have deep economic ties to.

Speaker 8 And where we're building the deeper relationship is with El Salvador, a tiny, relatively poor country that cannot do that much for us.

Speaker 41 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, they can house our prisoners extrajudicially. So that's pretty important.
Right.

Speaker 8 That's clearly a top goal for them. It's gross.
I mean, it was a gross scene him there in the Oval Office. And I think, you know, look,

Speaker 8 El Salvador has been an absolute basket case for a long time.

Speaker 8 And I think if you are in El Salvador, there is an argument to be made that Bukhalay's administration has been better than the prior administration because you basically had no rule of law in the country.

Speaker 8 And so, you know, whatever, you know, the manner in which that government is abusive is probably less abusive than the lack of governance regime that preceded it.

Speaker 41 Yeah, letting the gangs just slaughter people. Yeah.

Speaker 8 Right. But we are not a basket case like that.

Speaker 8 And so the idea that we need this sort of, you know, iron fist strong man to assist us is, you know, obviously substantively crazy, but it appeals to Trump, and he wishes that he could be a leader like Bukhalay.

Speaker 8 But Bukhalay also has a really high approval rating because his administration is better for El Salvador than the prior one.

Speaker 8 Donald Trump is not bringing improvements for the United States, so that's why he doesn't have the kind of numbers that Bukhalay has.

Speaker 41 Well, I want to play for you, and we'll put your legal podcast hat on, Stephen Miller in the Oval, explaining why the 9-0 loss that the administration took at the Supreme Court was actually a victory.

Speaker 41 Would like to hear your analysis of it.

Speaker 44 And a a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here.

Speaker 44 That issue was raised to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful, and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously, stating clearly that neither Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador, who, again, is a member of MS-13, which, is I'm sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world.

Speaker 44 And I can promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.

Speaker 41 Josh, what do you think about that legal analysis from the deputy president?

Speaker 8 I mean, I think it's interesting that as this administration becomes more bold about

Speaker 8 disregarding court orders, they still feel the need to pretend that they are following the court orders.

Speaker 8 I mean, Stephen Miller could have gotten up there and just said, you know, screw the Supreme Court. We're going to do what we want.
He didn't.

Speaker 8 He instead chose to mischaracterize their ruling and say that they were complying with it, which they're not. On the other hand, the Supreme Court could have been a little more clearer than it was.

Speaker 8 And I think maybe they will be a little bit clearer the next time the case gets up to them.

Speaker 8 I think it'll be interesting to see what the administration does when there's, you know, there isn't the available fig leaf where they can, because the Supreme Court, for those who didn't look at the order closely, the district judge had ordered the government to facilitate and effectuate Kilmar's return to the United States.

Speaker 8 And what the Supreme Court said was they should facilitate it, but this court needs to go back and say what they mean by effectuate because you have to have a certain degree of deference to the executive branch and the conduct of foreign policy.

Speaker 41 So a good-natured semantic fight over a man's life at the highest level of the Supreme Court. That's nice.
What does the word effectuate mean?

Speaker 8 Right. And the Supreme Court can come back, and I think quite possibly will end up having to come back to give more detailed instructions to the U.S.
government about what it should do here.

Speaker 8 The obvious fact on the matter is that if we wanted this guy back, we would have him back.

Speaker 8 The government of El Salvador is quite pliant to the Trump administration, as you saw from him in the Oval Office.

Speaker 8 It's literally true that we cannot extract an El Salvadoran citizen from El Salvador without the consent of the government of El Salvador.

Speaker 8 But the obvious thing is that we would get the consent of the government of El Salvador if we actually wanted it.

Speaker 41 We're also paying them.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 8 So that's another way that the courts might end up intervening here is they can say, you know, well, you can't send money to El Salvador for this, and that's a domestic thing, even though there's the foreign policy component here.

Speaker 8 So I think we're not quite done with this case and the Supreme Court and seeing what the administration will do.

Speaker 8 There's been a lot of desire on the part of the conservative justices on the court to treat the Trump administration like an essentially normal presidential administration where the U.S.

Speaker 8 government generally gets a lot more deference than other litigants when it's before the Supreme Court.

Speaker 8 And I think that that was an unreasonable view on their part to begin with, but it's becoming increasingly untenable.

Speaker 8 And I don't know the extent to which they actually believed that or they don't want to be crosswise with Trump or whatever versus that they felt that that's the position the court has to start from.

Speaker 8 We're dealing with the U.S. government and the first thing we have to do is act like they are a normal good faith litigant and see what happens.

Speaker 8 But I think it's becoming clear that they are not only becoming clear, but becoming impossible to look away from the fact that they are not a good faith litigant.

Speaker 8 And so I don't know exactly what the court is going to do as the administration increasingly gives them the finger.

Speaker 8 But I think, you know, one possibility is that the court is going to set itself up to be more adverse to them in the long run.

Speaker 41 God willing. All right, last topic.
You're a graduate of Harvard. You never talk about that.
You never mention that. But Harvard is in the news recently.

Speaker 41 And I was just wondering how you feel about your alma mater.

Speaker 41 telling the Trump administration to pound sand. They were not going to cut a deal with them like Columbia did and change their hiring practices, et cetera.
What do you make of the story?

Speaker 8 I think it's a good thing that Harvard did. I think that the list of demands that the administration sent to them was unworkable and in some cases contradictory.

Speaker 8 I mean, the government told them to stop doing hiring practices that are based on characteristics and then another one that says basically you need to hire more conservatives.

Speaker 41 Skin color characteristics. Oh my god.
Very specific characteristics you're allowed to hire from.

Speaker 8 The other thing about this is that the list of demands was quite different from the list of demands that was sent to Columbia and more expansive.

Speaker 8 And then also when Columbia said, okay, fine, we're going to do what you tell us to do, instead of saying, okay, you know, thank you, Columbia, for complying with our demands, they just sent more demands to Columbia.

Speaker 8 And so it's different from what's gone on with the law firms, where the administration seems eager to cut these deals with big law firms.

Speaker 8 And a lot of the deals with the law firms kind of look like the administration isn't actually demanding that much from them.

Speaker 8 They have to say that they're going to follow employment law, which they already had to do.

Speaker 8 They have to do certain pro bono work in certain areas, but those areas are quite broadly defined, such that, you know, if the law firm has to do pro bono work supporting veterans and fighting anti-Semitism, maybe they were doing some of that work already.

Speaker 8 They can recategorize that, or maybe, you know, there are areas of sufficiently shared interest that it's not a gross thing for them to be doing.

Speaker 8 And regardless of whether or not the firms are right about this.

Speaker 41 Well, I would just say the deals always get worse with Trump for the law firm. So we'll see what's coming.

Speaker 8 We'll see what's coming, but there's a non-crazy case to be made internally at the firms that, you know, well, gee, we're not really agreeing to very much here.

Speaker 8 The list of demands that they sent to Harvard, there was no way to say, well, gee, we're not really agreeing to very much here.

Speaker 8 It was basically subjecting Harvard's whole, you know, their academic decisions to politicians in the U.S.

Speaker 8 government and letting them tell them who to hire and which departments need to be diversified ideologically and all sorts of things.

Speaker 8 It was a list of demands that looks to me like it was written to get a no from Harvard.

Speaker 8 If they wanted a yes, they could have written a list of demands that was designed to get to yes in the way that they have done with the law firms.

Speaker 8 I think the administration wants the fight with universities, and Harvard is exceptionally well financially resourced, so they're in an especially good position to say no.

Speaker 8 But I think that, you know, this looks to me like the administration is not actually trying to get the universities to heal, but is trying to get to this fight with the universities.

Speaker 8 They want them to say no, and they've sent such an expansive list of demands because it is designed to get a no out of them.

Speaker 41 Yeah, sometimes, you know, it's best to just assume that they have like totally incompetent, crazy people who would never be anywhere near power writing these sorts of things.

Speaker 41 And so, you know, it maybe doesn't make sense to come up with post hoc rationalizations for it.

Speaker 41 But if your argument is right, and I think there's something to be said for it, they want this fight with the universities. I think the flip side of that coin is

Speaker 41 maybe they don't want the fight as much with the law firms because what they really want is the chilling effect on these law firms like representing future whistleblowers, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Speaker 41 Like they would rather like have the deal and get these people in the tent, so to speak.

Speaker 41 I mean, maybe that's a little overstated, but that's of greater value than the PR fight. Is that possible?

Speaker 8 I think it's possible, although I think it remains to be seen how effective the law firm strategy is about denying representation to people that the administration doesn't want represented.

Speaker 8 Law is such a fragmented industry, and there are so many law firms out there, and there are litigation boutiques that

Speaker 8 rely less on a positive relationship with the government as compared to these giant firms that do a lot of MNA and other things where it's, you know, they go in and meet with government officials and it's important that everyone be nice.

Speaker 8 And so I think it's possible that they have made it significantly harder for people to get lawyers to fight the administration, but I think it's also possible that they haven't actually made it that much harder and that the representations will just sort of be shuffled around in terms of which firms they go to.

Speaker 8 So I don't know whether it's true that the administration has actually gotten a lot out of the law firm fight other than getting people to make a show of deference to the president, which I think he personally values a lot.

Speaker 8 I think he likes the fact that these powerful managing partners of these law firms have to come to the Oval Office and beg him for something.

Speaker 8 But I also think that they could have demanded more from the law firms and still gotten some of them to say yes.

Speaker 8 If they were really trying to put the screws, they would have made the list of demands sufficiently onerous that you would have had some firms saying yes and some saying no.

Speaker 8 And I think that they would enjoy the show of causing one of these law firms to go bankrupt.

Speaker 8 I mean, you know, if you have one of these firms that stands up to the administration and wins in in court, but their clients for M ⁇ A and antitrust and other things where they're really relying on a relationship with the government, if those fall away and the attorneys in those practice areas fall away, I mean, you could see these firms blowing up, especially since the administration is also pushing us into a recession that is already bad for the legal business.

Speaker 8 So I would have expected them to want that. I think they would have wanted a big, high-profile law firm implosion, and I think they may well have been able to cause one.

Speaker 8 I mean, and maybe it'll happen to one of the handful of firms that's fighting them, but I think think that generally the firms that are fighting know that their business is different and they're not as exposed as the firms that folded.

Speaker 8 I'm a little bit surprised by what they've done with the law firms because I would have expected the administration to sort of welcome that fight more and actually try to make demands such that some of them would have said no in the way that they've done with the universities.

Speaker 8 I don't know entirely what to make of it.

Speaker 41 Josh Barrel, thank you for your centenary and facts. I hope you enjoyed Gaga and Amare, et cetera, as much as I did.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Unbelievable.
So good.

Speaker 41 Did you have another favorite

Speaker 8 I love Charlie, Charlie XEX. She has such a presence.
She's just up there on, like, Gaga has dozens of backup dancers and had this amazing, lush production.

Speaker 8 Charlie's just up there by herself, holding a red solo cup in one hand and the microphone in the other. And she manages in her like messy, chaotic way to command this giant stage.

Speaker 8 I think it's actually, it's really impressive, and it was a super fun set.

Speaker 41 Hard to argue. And you're probably more brat than Kamala, I would say.

Speaker 8 Well, I mean, nobody's more brat than Donald Trump.

Speaker 41 Is that true? Oh, no, Josh. Now you're in trouble.
Josh Barrow, up next, Congressman Chris Belugia.

Speaker 8 Thanks, Tim.

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Speaker 41 All right, we're here with a Democratic Congressman representing Pennsylvania's 17th district, which includes the Pittsburgh suburbs and all of Beaver County.

Speaker 41 His name is Chris DeLuzio. How are you doing, Congressman?

Speaker 46 Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 41 Of course, for folks, you know, who don't monitor my social media as closely as they should, I popped off kind of aggressively on a video that the House Dems posted of you talking about the need for strategic tariffs last week.

Speaker 41 So I just appreciate you coming on into the Lion's Den. You know, who knows what's going to happen here.

Speaker 41 Like, I could have a primary challenger just like pop up like a Jerry Springer video in the podcast. But so I appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 46 Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 41 Before we get to the tariff stuff, though, tell people about you. Just give us a little first date TLDR about your backstory.

Speaker 8 Yeah, you bet.

Speaker 46 Born and raised in my district, which I love. It's western Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, all the way to the Ohio and West Virginia borders.
Battleground, you know, swing district.

Speaker 46 Went to the Naval Academy after high school. So 9-11 is my senior year of high school.
It makes me 40, which I guess is middle age now.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I hear you, man. I'm there.

Speaker 46 Yeah.

Speaker 46 I deployed at sea a couple of times.

Speaker 46 I did a tour on the ground in Iraq, and then I came home, became a lawyer, did some voting rights work, Brennan Center, worked with the University of Pittsburgh, and then ran for Congress in 2022.

Speaker 46 My predecessor and friend, Connor Lamb, ran for the Senate. I held that seat.
Now I'm my second term serving in the House.

Speaker 41 And, you know, there have been several profiles of you lately because you're maybe a little bit different from the PAC and the Democrats. But I want you to kind of profile yourself.

Speaker 41 How do you kind of place yourself within the Democratic conference ideologically?

Speaker 46 You know, I think we're in a moment where like we're scrambling the old left, right, center stuff for Democrats. And for a long time, that's been the divide.

Speaker 46 And yet I've been seeing colleagues across, say, the New Democrats and the Progressive Caucus and the Blue Dogs who are

Speaker 46 where I am, which is to say like aggressively front center on the economy and fighting for our people against whoever is ripping them off and making life worse.

Speaker 46 And I think that's actually like a glue that can connect more of the Democrats.

Speaker 46 You know, there are parts of it that are pretty progressive and there are parts of it that are all about growing the pie, right?

Speaker 46 Like it's one thing to say, you work hard, let's make sure you get a bigger piece of the pie, but let's also grow the damn thing. And I think that's where I want the party to go.

Speaker 46 And so there are parts of more progressive populist economics, and there are parts of

Speaker 46 my abundance colleagues that I think together that is the future for Democrats and can frankly put us in a strong position to unite to fight against Donald Trump in this moment.

Speaker 41 Okay, I'm sorry, Chris. This is not going to work for me because on social media, I'm told by the very heavy posters that you have to either be a progressive populist or

Speaker 41 in favor of the abundance agenda. Like you can't have both.
And it's a bitter feud among like 13 people on social media. So I'm going to need you to pick a team, I think.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 46 And like, look, I have problems, I think, with that framing. And I'll tell you why, right?

Speaker 46 I think the fighting instinct and the very honest view of power and who has it and who's in the way is the part that, you know, my populist instinct gets clearly.

Speaker 46 And my colleagues in that point of view, I think, get that.

Speaker 46 The growth part that the abundance crowd is, I think, focused on is correct. Like, we have to have growth.

Speaker 46 There are obstacles and people with power and institutions with power who are blocking that, which to me, I think, is maybe missing from the analysis there.

Speaker 46 But I look at this, I'm like, look, people should have a bigger piece of the pie and we got to grow it. And I think that is a glue that we can have Democrats unite around.

Speaker 46 We'll have to pick some fights. And I love a good fight, believe me.

Speaker 46 But I think it's where we go. And I think it is, you know, a real contrast to Trump's phony fake populism.
I mean, this is real stuff, right?

Speaker 46 Fighting against monopolies, getting whoever is in the way of us getting more affordable housing to people, making sure life's not a ripoff. Like we will have some fights, and that's a good thing.

Speaker 46 And it will expose how fake Trump's stuff is. That's just, you know, talking points about caring about working people.

Speaker 41 I like the Kumbaya stuff, but I'm going to do my best to try to pick a scab here. So what about looking back? Okay.

Speaker 41 You know, and obviously the Democrats lost two of three presidential campaigns to Trump. As you reflect on that, what do you attribute that to? What are things the party should have done differently?

Speaker 41 How long do we have?

Speaker 41 As long as you want, as you know, as long as it's interesting.

Speaker 46 So I'm in Western Pennsylvania, right? This is like a battleground within the battleground state. And, you know, Trump comes on the scene.

Speaker 46 You know, he's now been the nominee for the Republicans, three presidential elections.

Speaker 8 And I think he picked at

Speaker 46 a weakness for Democrats, which was, you know, he was saying the things about NAFTA and saying the things about seeing manufacturing jobs go away and playing on some real frustration and anger that people in my part of the world still have.

Speaker 46 And it was both Republicans and Democrats in power across decades who caused the death of, say,

Speaker 46 the glass factories in Western Pennsylvania, a lot of the steel mills, you name it. Trump played on that.
Now, his answer is ridiculous, right? The trade war he's he's starting is not working.

Speaker 46 It's causing tons of pain. It's destabilizing world markets.
Tariffs alone don't work. But he's played on that.
You know, he plays on racial grievances and all the rest.

Speaker 41 But I think

Speaker 46 his ability to be a chaos agent and to play on the fact that people have seen the American dream slip away, you're not more likely to be better off than your parents.

Speaker 46 And that's a change in the first generation that's happened for since the Second World War. That's a problem.
And I don't think he has the answers for that.

Speaker 46 But if we're offering up, we're going to defend the norms and institutions and the elite people who run them when they've failed, it's not going to work.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 41 So just a little bit too establishmenty for you from Kamla and Secretary Clinton.

Speaker 46 It's not a personal thing to hurt. I think it just has to do with

Speaker 46 who Democrats are fighting for. And I have this fear that Democrats are too wedded to this.
We got to find a win-win everywhere.

Speaker 46 And like, listen, there are plenty of problems where you get a win-win and it's great. But like, sometimes there's an asshole who's like hurting your people.

Speaker 46 And it's not enough to say, I'm fighting for you. It's also got to be, I'm fighting against that asshole.
And I think we need a little more of that as Democrats.

Speaker 46 You had my buddy Pat Ryan on recently, and he and I talk about this a lot.

Speaker 46 It's not just Donald Trump or anyone else. It is whoever is making life miserable for your people is who we got to fight.

Speaker 46 And we got to name them and we got to take them on because because you can't just be, I'm going to fight for you without naming who that villain is. I think Democrats need a little more of that.

Speaker 41 And the villains for you are.

Speaker 46 It depends. I mean, right now, Donald Trump is wrecking the global economy.
He's a villain in many ways.

Speaker 46 But it's also, you know, Monopoly who's screwing over my local pharmacies. I had a couple local pharmacists come down to D.C.
with me. We launched this, you know, anti-monopoly caucus.

Speaker 46 These are small business owner types. You know, think of like Rotary Club, local chamber of commerce.
These are not, you know, fire-breathing lefties.

Speaker 46 And they're important businesses in a community on your main street. And they're getting squeezed by like PBMs, these pharmacy benefit managers.
They're essentially monopolists.

Speaker 46 There's three or four of these companies that got like 80% of the market share and they're killing pharmacies. And so I name that as a fight.
It is a fight.

Speaker 46 And it's an example where there is a bad guy who's hurting pharmacies, who's driving up prescription costs, and you got to name them and what you're going to do about it.

Speaker 46 And I think we need more of those kinds of fights. We should pick them.
We should take them on. We should be clear who we're standing up for in those fights.

Speaker 8 All right.

Speaker 41 Well, let's get to our little, I wouldn't call it a fight. Let's get to our little minor tiff over the tariff strategy.
And I want to, for people who didn't see it,

Speaker 41 this was the video that House Dems put out where you were kind of talking about your position on tariffs. Let's listen to it.

Speaker 46 Chris DeLuzio here from Western Pennsylvania, proud son of the Rust Belt. I think a wrong for decades consensus in Washington on free trade has been a race to the bottom.

Speaker 46 It's hollowed out our industrial power, cost us good jobs. The president's tariff announcement, though, and his trade strategy has been chaotic.
It's been inconsistent.

Speaker 46 We should not treat our economic allies, like Canada, the same as trade cheats like communist China. I do not want to see corporations use the cover of these tariffs to now price gouge families.

Speaker 46 Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically or they can be misused.
They've got to be used in sectors that make sense.

Speaker 46 They've got to be paired with real, meaningful industrial policies.

Speaker 41 You know, not bad for a panel discussion that you and I are on, just so you give a more friendly view. But is this really kind of the moment for that? Strategic tariffs.

Speaker 41 Isn't there a clearer message that Democrats could be offering at the moment?

Speaker 46 Well, I think let's start with the easy thing, right? What Donald Trump is doing is reckless and dangerous, and he should stop.

Speaker 46 I mean, I think you have near unanimity, I think, among Democrats on that point, period.

Speaker 46 I don't think it's ever enough for Democrats to just be this guy is bad and particularly just Donald Trump is bad. Like we've tried that, right? We lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

Speaker 46 I don't think we can define ourselves just in opposition to him.

Speaker 46 And yet, what he's doing is tremendously dumb and dangerous.

Speaker 46 And even a guy like me from the Rust Belt, from Steel Country, who is mad about seeing manufacturing go away, can say clearly what he's doing is wrong, is foolish, is dangerous.

Speaker 46 Like, I think that helps Democrats when a guy like me can say how bad President Trump has been here.

Speaker 41 Yeah. Even from a working class perspective, though, I guess my point is: isn't the argument right now that what he's doing is destructive and it's actually hurting working people?

Speaker 41 It's going to hurt their bottom line of the grocery store. It's going to hurt the cost of building things.
It's going to cost jobs.

Speaker 41 I mean, some manufacturing jobs are going to be lost over these sorts of tariffs. And isn't that a clearer message in contrast to maybe Biden's industrial policy

Speaker 41 better than trying to split the baby on tariffs, I guess is my question. Yeah, maybe, right?

Speaker 46 Like, I think the first part, for sure, like, I mean, I spent some time this last week with some folks in organized labor in Western Pennsylvania who were saying exactly what you were saying, like, we're taking hits on our pensions.

Speaker 46 We're worried about losing out on bids for new construction and jobs because of materials and uncertainty and costs. Like, absolutely.

Speaker 46 But I still think we got to have an answer for what Democrats want to say and do about our industrial power.

Speaker 46 And this is not just some, you know, homage to the past of we should make more things as some good on its own. We should make more things for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 46 But like if nothing else, our national security. I serve on the Armed Services Committee.
I know what our defense industrial base is. It is a hollow shell of its past.

Speaker 46 We cannot produce the things we need for our national security, period.

Speaker 46 And I think if Democrats cede ground to Donald Trump as being the only guy who's trying to do something about this, and he's failing, I mean, let's be clear, he's failing at it.

Speaker 46 If we seed that ground, we're making a huge mistake on policy and on politics, right? Because we got to win in Pennsylvania. We got to win in Michigan.

Speaker 46 We got to win in Wisconsin, not just in 26 and the midterms, but we got to win the presidency back.

Speaker 46 And I'm telling you, he is going to peddle the same BS he's peddled about standing up for workers when doing nothing to help them. We got to have more than just, he's messed up.

Speaker 46 And I think for me, Democrats have to be able to win in these places. We know how to do it, right? I intend to to keep winning.
Josh Shapiro, I think, is going to kick butt next year in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 46 So we got to be able to have a message and something beyond just he is bad on trade for us to be able to earn back some trust to people.

Speaker 41 I think that the national security side of that is totally right. And it was in line.

Speaker 41 I don't think that President Biden was particularly great at enunciating that message, but it was in line with what they were trying to do, right?

Speaker 41 With chips and a lot of the stuff in the Biden administration.

Speaker 46 I think the abundance crowd correctly pointed out, right, that

Speaker 3 we, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

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Speaker 46 The Chips and Science Act, okay, you know, good bill. I would have supported it if I were in the Congress.

Speaker 8 You got to move fast.

Speaker 46 It can't take years and years and years to get stuff done. Same with the IRA, right? Getting money out to build, say, the EV

Speaker 46 charging infrastructure can't take a decade.

Speaker 46 So there is something to be said for speed and actually getting the government to accomplish things, especially as you're trying to attract private investment to act here.

Speaker 41 All right. Now you're speaking my language.
Okay, since you got me excited, I got to ask you one more question. We got to dork out on free trade for a second.

Speaker 41 Have you seen the chart, the manufacturing jobs chart, and how it was basically already going down?

Speaker 41 You know, the argument being that there are structural forces that were making this happen and like NAFTA really didn't change the trajectory that much at all. What would you say to that?

Speaker 46 So, a couple of things, right? That's number of jobs rather than like share of the economy. And so, there are some productivity gains baked into that.
Sure.

Speaker 46 It's also, you know, NAFTA was not the beginning of different trade policies in this country, right? The steel industry collapsed in the mid-80s in western Pennsylvania.

Speaker 46 That's before NAFTA, but we still had pressure from, say, Japan before that.

Speaker 46 We had pressure domestically where you know, the South was basically guaranteeing these companies there'll never be a union here.

Speaker 46 Bring your factory to Arkansas or alabama so we had domestic pressure against the rust belt for a while and we did have you know industries take a real gut punch post nafta you know automotive glass manufacturing some others but again like if trade makes sense with our allies on fair terms absolutely that has gone too far that we can no longer produce the things we need even for our basic defense.

Speaker 46 You know, the Chips and Science Act wasn't just some academic thing. We had essentially allowed the Communist Chinese Party to dominate global manufacturing of semiconductor chips.

Speaker 46 That's a major problem. And so I think there have been excesses here.
And I'll take you back to parts of my district, right?

Speaker 46 We could drive along the Allegheny and Ohio rivers and go through the glass factory and steel mill towns and see what was left when, say, a JNL steel and ale equipment went from more than 10,000 jobs to zero.

Speaker 46 I mean, it is real devastation and pain that comes to communities when this happens. I think the bargain, you know, may have worked out in some parts of the country.

Speaker 46 It has not been a good bargain for a town like Aliquippa to go from, again, 10,000 plus union steelworker jobs at JNL to, you know, now you got some cheaper stuff at Walmart.

Speaker 46 It's not been a good bargain for lots of people.

Speaker 41 One more thing on the tariff. You guys are looking at

Speaker 41 investigating insider trading among your colleagues in Congress, you know, following the Trump tariff reversal.

Speaker 41 It seems like our girl, Marjorie Taylor Greene, managed to make some smart investments, shall we say, before the Trump tariff reversal. What do you make of what's happening on that issue?

Speaker 8 Man, it's corrupt, right?

Speaker 46 Like, I'm a guy who doesn't think anyone in Congress should be trading stocks, period.

Speaker 8 All right, so let's start with that.

Speaker 46 You know, we all get access to sensitive information.

Speaker 46 The fact that people make money trading stocks, I don't care what party you are. I think it's corrupt.
People hate it. The tariff announcement, and now this feels like weeks ago, right?

Speaker 46 Remember, he tweeted about it or put it on True Social or whatever. You know, great day to buy.
And then a couple hours later, he announces the pause.

Speaker 46 And there's some evidence people knew about that and we're making some trades. That is corrupt to its core.
I think it's like the exact reason people don't trust our government.

Speaker 46 And so I am all in for whatever investigation we can do to find out who knew and did they make trades based on that? Because they're not just doing this in isolation.

Speaker 46 They're ripping people off, right?

Speaker 46 You're a pension fund. You're on the other side of these people trading.
You're losing money at the expense of people enriching themselves based on their jobs. So I don't think it's that complicated.

Speaker 46 Like people can smell corruption, and this is it.

Speaker 41 I want to go to the Oval Office meeting yesterday, the president had with Bukele, like a self-styled world's coolest dictator from El Salvador, who's currently holding a number of people in his like torture prison there.

Speaker 41 Just the biggest picture, I'm wondering what you made of what we saw in the OVA.

Speaker 8 You know, it's,

Speaker 46 I struggle to put it to words because it's just insane to think about this is where the leader of the free world is now.

Speaker 46 And one of the people who's come up, gentleman from Maryland, union apprentice, was here lawfully. The government conceded that they removed him from this country by error.

Speaker 46 And, you know, Trump is now facing down a 9-0 Supreme Court against him that this guy ought to be brought back home.

Speaker 46 And I actually think a really important, maybe a little bit overlooked part of this.

Speaker 46 You had the leader of the building trades unions in Washington last week rallying.

Speaker 41 I actually have that audio. Let's listen to it.
And then we'll talk about it. Let's listen to it.

Speaker 47 With the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-fill your careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt?

Speaker 47 You don't call Elon Musk. You call us.

Speaker 47 North America's building trades unions.

Speaker 47 And yeah, that means all of us.

Speaker 47 All of us, including our brother, Smart Apprentice, Kilmar Arbrega Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now. Bring him home.

Speaker 8 Hell yeah. All right.
Go ahead.

Speaker 46 No, I mean, look, that's powerful, right? Like, these are not bleeding art lefties. These are the guys and gals in the building trades.

Speaker 46 We're talking iron workers, carpenters, steam fitters, you name it. And I was touring local 12 sheet metal workers in my district last few days, talking about all the stuff you'd expect.

Speaker 46 You know what else they brought up? Bringing their brother home.

Speaker 46 And that's like a really powerful thing that you see labor standing with this guy and helping, frankly, do the thing we got to do, which is defend our Constitution, the rule of law.

Speaker 46 Like, that's a powerful part of this that I hope gets a lot of attention. So I'm glad you had that clip.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I also think it's powerful because you hear him, you hear Rogan talk about this. I don't know.
And mean, sometimes I feel like there is an elite view in DC that's like,

Speaker 41 you know, it's mostly globalists anyway. They're for looser immigration, but they know that that's unpopular, right? And that Trump won on immigration.

Speaker 41 And so there's this like uncertainty or unwillingness a little bit or caution about engaging on something like this where it's so cut and dry. It's not really even about the border or security.

Speaker 41 It's about everybody's individual rights. So we're going to wrongly send somebody to a foreign gulag.
I mean, that is madness.

Speaker 41 And I do think that can resonate with people who also think we need a stronger border, concerned about immigration, et cetera.

Speaker 46 Yeah. And we have to tell stories too and like talk about our values.
Yeah. Most people think that you want to work hard, take a shot at the American dream.

Speaker 46 Like, hell yeah, that ought to be front and center.

Speaker 46 What we expect of citizens in this country, what we expect of aspiring citizens, like we want our government to reward.

Speaker 46 This is a guy who's working his butt off to become a union apprentice, trying to do exactly that, who had every right to be in this country. And so it should outrage you.

Speaker 46 And I think, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of calling that out, right?

Speaker 46 Of like, this is a moment where, you know, our system is going to be tested and tested around a guy who was doing what he should have been doing, working hard, trying to earn his shot at the American dream.

Speaker 41 Do you think there'd be any value in Democrats getting a like a Codel or something to go to El Salvador to try to draw more attention to this? Or what do you think is the right approach at this point?

Speaker 8 Maybe.

Speaker 46 I mean, you know, look, we don't have all the answers down in Washington, which is like, we should always remember that as elected officials.

Speaker 41 Maybe.

Speaker 41 And

Speaker 46 I think also what the president does in the next few days is going to tell us a hell of a lot about, you know, how the next year or so is going to go and whether we're going to have a constitutional crisis like this.

Speaker 8 All right.

Speaker 41 Finally, we're ending with bro talk in conversations with Democratic elected officials these days since, you know, there's a big bro gap in the electorate.

Speaker 41 As you mentioned earlier, we had your colleague Pat Ryan on a couple weeks ago.

Speaker 41 And I asked him, I was like, are there any Democrats who could go to an MMA fight or a WWE event and just like hang and like fit in and be normal or

Speaker 41 come to an LSU tailgate with me? And he nominated you.

Speaker 41 So my question for you is, you know, which of those kind of cultural events do you think you could engage with without coming off like a dork?

Speaker 41 I love it.

Speaker 46 As a kid, I was a huge WWF fan, which I guess now WWE.

Speaker 41 Who is your favorite wrestler? Oh, God.

Speaker 46 So, Stone Cold is a little bit older. Like, I'm a little older by the time he kind of pops off, but like, became, you know, a favorite as a kid.
Like, Hulk Hogan was the guy, right? I'm 40.

Speaker 41 So, ultimate warrior for me. Yeah.

Speaker 41 I think he went MAGA, though.

Speaker 46 Did he? I didn't even know that.

Speaker 41 I think so. Okay.
Sad.

Speaker 46 Yeah. So, like, I love the spectacle of wrestling.
and we got some like semi-pro local stuff in Western PA that I got to get to soon.

Speaker 41 You should. That's what we're talking about.
A semi-pro wrestling match. It's a good campaign to stop for you.
I'll get with your team on that. All right, Chris DeLuzio.
Thanks so much for coming on.

Speaker 41 And, you know, we'll have a trade symposium

Speaker 8 with

Speaker 41 some of the Abundance crew sometime soon. All right.

Speaker 46 All right, Tim. Thanks, man.

Speaker 41 We'll see you later. Thanks so much to Congressman Chris DeLuzio and to Josh Barrow.
We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the Bulwark Podcast. We'll see you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 41 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brett.

Speaker 41 I don't feel like nothing special.

Speaker 41 I snag my tights out on the lawn chair.

Speaker 41 Guess I'm a mess and play the role.

Speaker 48 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East This with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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